Susan B. Anthony

Life and legacy

Susan Brownell Anthony was born into a Quaker family in Adams, Massachusetts, in 1820. Her father, a cotton mill owner and abolitionist, raised his daughters to believe in their own intellectual equality. The Quaker tradition of women speaking in meetings gave Anthony a foundation that most women of her era lacked: the conviction that she had the right - and the duty - to speak publicly on matters of justice.

Anthony began her activist career as a temperance and anti-slavery advocate before meeting Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851. Their partnership became one of the most productive collaborations in the history of social reform. Stanton was the writer and theorist; Anthony was the organizer, strategist, and tireless campaigner. Together they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 and co-edited the radical newspaper The Revolution. For over fifty years, Anthony traveled ceaselessly, delivering speeches, organizing petitions, and lobbying legislators.

In 1872, Anthony deliberately voted in the presidential election in Rochester, New York, to test whether the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of citizenship rights applied to women. She was arrested, tried, and found guilty. When the judge asked if she had anything to say, she delivered a blistering speech arguing that the verdict denied her right to a trial by jury of her peers, since women could neither vote nor serve on juries. The trial became national news and galvanized the suffrage movement.

Anthony continued campaigning into her eighties, and her final public words at a suffrage convention in 1906 were: "Failure is impossible." She died six weeks later at eighty-six. It took fourteen more years, but the Nineteenth Amendment - prohibiting the denial of voting rights on the basis of sex - was ratified in 1920. It was known informally as the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment." In 1979, she became the first woman depicted on a U.S. circulating coin.

Key accomplishments

• Co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869) with Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Illegally voted in the 1872 presidential election to challenge women's exclusion from the ballot
• Campaigned for women's suffrage for over fifty years across the United States
• Co-edited The Revolution newspaper and co-authored the History of Woman Suffrage
• The Nineteenth Amendment (1920) was called the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment" in her honor

Quotes

Failure is impossible.

Final public speech, National American Woman Suffrage Association convention (February 1906)

Related figures